Shatner, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, set for Blue Origin launch
Al Jazeera
William Shatner, the actor who played iconic Star Trek character Captain Kirk, is set to travel to space for real on a Blue Origin space flight.
“Risk is our business,” James T Kirk once said. “That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.”
More than a half-century later, the performer who breathed life into the fabled Enterprise captain is, at age 90, making that kind of risk his own business and heading towards the stars under dramatically different circumstances than his fictional counterpart. And in doing so, William Shatner is causing worlds to collide, or at least permitting parallel universes to coexist — the utopian spacefaring vision of Star Trek and the evolving, increasingly commercial spot that “space” holds in the American psyche.
When Shatner boards Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin NS-18 in Texas around dawn Wednesday, his one small step into the craft creates one of the ultimate crossover stories of our era.
